Description
This book represents an effort to portray the Iroquois genius. Hiawatha, a fifteenth century Onondaga (or Mohawk) statesman, is used throughout as a symbol of this genius, which became one of the consequential forces shaping the destiny of the modern world.
Many sources have been drawn upon for material. The principal one, however, is the (unfortunately) fragmentary writings and conversations of a great scholar, philosopher and mystic-the late J. N. B. Hewitt of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology.
Mr. Hewitt was himself a Tuscarora Indian, of the Iro- quoian family. He possessed far more than a professional ethnologist's objective appreciation of the Iroquois mind, of Iroquois depths of thinking, and of the subtlety with which Iroquois ideas were expressed in language. His own mind was essentially an Iroquois mind. He himself thought in the Iroquois pattern. He was, however, able to view Anglo-Saxon culture with the same sort of detached objec- tivity as that achieved by the Anglo-Saxon specialist in con- sidering the ways of life of primitive peoples.
For more than forty years Mr. Hewitt struggled with the nearly impossible task of translating the Iroquois idiom and of interpreting the Iroquois genius in English, a language
